When someone has been stuck in the shadows of history, the light that finally shines on her accomplishments seems all the brighter — even if it bends and refracts through the lens of artistic license.

Lauren Gunderson's "Silent Sky," much like the movie "Hidden Figures," re-centers women who made critical, groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of space. Like "Hidden Figures," it also takes liberties with the biographies of its subjects. But in First Folio Theatre's staging, directed by Melanie Keller, it mostly shines with an inner light of emotional honesty that carries us past some of its formulaic familiarities.

The central figure here is Henrietta Swan Leavitt, an astronomer at Harvard College Observatory in the first decades of the 20th century. Leavitt's discoveries, related to the luminosity of a class of stars known as Cepheid variables, provided the key to measuring the distance between Earth and other galaxies, eventually paving the way for better-known astronomers such as Edwin Hubble.

Leavitt and her fellow "computers" (she and her female colleagues at Harvard had the same title as the NASA women) made their discoveries despite never being allowed to use the observatory's refracting telescope. Instead, we see them look at glass plates — photographic images of tiny slices of the sky that they painstakingly catalog and assess over years.

Gunderson's play juxtaposes some familiar conflicts: career versus romance, career versus family obligations, scientific inquiry versus holy mystery. At times, these play out in literal diptychs with overlapping dialogue (deftly handled by Keller and her cast). But even though it's sometimes easy to see her plugging these elements into the plot, Gunderson also allows warmhearted wit, leavened with wistful regret, to fill the spaces between the plot developments.

Cassandra Bissell's Henrietta is a polite but forthright rebel. In her first meeting with the (fictional) assistant at the observatory, Peter Shaw (Wardell Julius Clark), she points out how ridiculous it is that women can't use the telescope. She is, after all, a Radcliffe grad, "which is basically Harvard in skirts."

Soon she settles — somewhat grudgingly — into the grind with her colleagues, Annie Cannon (Jeannie Affelder) and Willamina Fleming (Belinda Bremner). The former's stiff-necked, by-the-book approach hides a strong suffragist leaning, while the latter brings hoydenish irreverence to the workroom. Describing the job to the new arrival, Bremner's Fleming says, "At present, we're cleaning up the universe for men and making fun of them behind their backs. It's worked for centuries."

Shaw's blossoming romantic interest in her and Henrietta's own guilt over leaving her sister, Margaret (Hayley Rice), back on the Wisconsin homestead test her work-before-all-else resolve. Gunderson marks the passage of years through epistolary passages between Margaret and Henrietta — the latter of whom is far less faithful a correspondent than her sister. Margaret is a wife and mother with dreams of composing a symphony. But in Gunderson's telling, it's Margaret's music that finally provides the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Cepheids — ironic, since Henrietta is partially deaf.

Bissell is the steady star in the center of this piece, and she holds that position with grace, letting us see small glimpses of the price Henrietta pays for her devotion to celestial matters. Clark, as the lone man in this refreshingly woman-centric tale (it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors), also brings out shades of vulnerability amid his sometimes-bumbling attempts to woo Henrietta.

Rice's Margaret and Affelder's Cannon work as two sides of the same coin — women who see in Henrietta the chance to soar professionally that eludes them. (The real Cannon, like Henrietta Leavitt, was also nearly deaf, which Gunderson doesn't touch on here.)

First Folio's venue — a high-ceilinged former chapel — provides a spare yet expansive backdrop for this story. Angela Weber Miller's set consists of curved paneled walls in greenish-gray hues and suggests a clouded sky waiting for light to pierce through and reveal its glories. John "Smooch" Medina's projections, combined with Michael McNamara's lights and Christopher Kriz's elegantly evocative original music, give us a heavenly light show with the music of the spheres.

Where do we fit in this vastness? Henrietta Leavitt helped map the distances in space, and paradoxically brought us closer to understanding our own place in the universe. Though "Silent Sky," like "Hidden Figures," indulges in some familiar dramaturgical tropes, it also shines with the luminous joy of re-centering women whose achievements have been too long overlooked by the telescope of history.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 07, 2017, in the On the Town section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Light shines on female astronomers" —
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